Untitled.

In life or love pain must be felt. There is no other alternative. But that pain is accompainied by something else… hope.

“You have no idea how much you mean to me.  Maybe you choose not to see it.  Maybe you look past it because it scares you, but I’ve always been in love with you. We’ve seen the best and worst of each other.  You were a part of the reason I hit rock bottom, but you also influenced who I am today and I couldn’t be more grateful for that.  It scares me being with you.  It scares me how much I’m going to miss you.  I’ll always be hopeful.  I can’t help it.”

You gradually get over the pain. It doesn’t go away, not for a long time, but it becomes easier to live with. One morning you wake up and he’s not the first thing on your mind. And then a few months down the line you realize you’ve made it through half the day without thinking of him. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes, years, but eventually you reach a point when you only think about them occassionally. You manage to do this because you don’t see them, you don’t hear about them, you try not to think about them. And then you bump into them walking down the street, or someone unexpected mentions their name . . . and the memories come flooding back. But memories also become less painful in time, and I can talk about them now without really feeling anything. But I’d rather now. If you know what I mean. Was I ever truly over him? At one time I was sure that the answer was yes. But if seeing him again- and merely touching his hand- could peel back so many layers of my heart, then did I ever stop loving him the way you’re supposed to stop loving everyone but the one you’re with?

It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss. I sat down with a couple of people recently and as I looked around the table, I thought wow, we are all broken people. Of course, we all understand this in theory, but the practice of understanding and welcoming the brokenness of others, especially people who we look to as leaders is an almost impossible task. But still we try to maintain for what we are NOT, after all we have to lead them in any case.

I lead people, have led people and sometimes, I do a crappy job and have done it pretty badly with my brokenness spilling out in all my sloppy need and sin. I need grace, I desperately want to make right my offenses, I want to be forgiven. I want to lead people well but sometimes, I fail.

I am guilty. Guilty of forgetting that people who have led me, people who have walked with me are broken, imperfect and perfectly fallible. Being surrounded by brokenness, even creation groans and writhes in destructiveness, I am looking for something better, something less broken, more perfect. So guilty, I confess that I have put people who are leaders in the position of being that something better, that something less broken. In fact, they are not less broken, maybe they just have more responsibility and maybe sometimes they handle that badly. Yet, I struggle to forgive the debts of those who basically broken like me but hold positions of power, I simply can not get over that they are not more perfect than I am. I have made them demi-gods. Given them power in my life and expected that they would use it well and i fiercely hoped that they would not fail me. They did fail me. They have failed me. People who lead are broken, they are me, human, frail, fallible and destructive at times. Hopefully, they are also vulnerable and transparent, if in fact we will let them be...